Ten years ago, I started this website as a simple experiment with very straightforward goals: To see if I could write my own blogging engine (which I did, it was very simple…the earliest capture of my site is available here from April of '05). It was quickly overwhelmed with traffic, and I migrated it to Scott Watermasysk's excellent .Text platform, which was later folded into Community Server, which is what this site still runs to this day, even though it has been deprecated, and is now...

I've been struggling over the past couple of years to find a new purpose in keeping this site up and running. Over the past 2-3 years, most of my posts have been random in nature, and few and far between. I started this site back in 2003, so it's been almost 10 years since my first post. Back then I was just getting into the realm of professional IT (my first "real" IT job was in 2002), so naturally I started this off as a software development platform. .Net was brand spanking new...

I have a love/hate relationship with my personal website/blog. When I started this site almost 9 years ago, social networking wasn’t even in the vocabulary of the internet, and personal branding was a must have. Fast forward to 2012, and Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are ubiquitous, and Tumblr is a great turnkey solution. I purposely left out Google+ because like so many other companies, they are way too late to the party. This website is a labor of love, but a little more laborious as of late...

Seven years ago, I started this blog as an experiment; little did I know that after all this time I’d still be doing this. I haven’t posted nearly as much as I’d like since I got out of the IT industry, but it’s amazing how much has changed both in my life and the internet in general after all these years. I wouldn’t have it any other way to be honest. Who knows what the next few years hold in store for me…I’m looking forward to the journey though.

It took me a couple of tries to get the new Windows Live beta package installed on my machine; the secret fix for me was to enable the Windows Firewall service (I disable it since I’m behind other firewalls), so if your install is failing, turn on the Firewall service. You can turn it off again after you’re done. The previous version of Windows Live Writer hasn’t worked on any of my machines for quite some time now, so it’s nice that the new version actually works again. I might actually start keeping...

I cannot believe it's been 3 years since I first decided to build my own blogging engine as a coding exercise one lonely night back in 2003, and here I am still pounding away at the keyboard in an attempt to keep my 5 loyal readers somewhat entertained. The most notable thing that happened to my site was that traffic congestion finally forced me to move it off my home network and over to a real hosting solution. Site content also noticeably started going more towards the Community Server end of the...

Anyone who lives in the Georgia/South Carolina/North Carolina regions of the U.S. no doubt know that we got absolutely hammered Saturday night by storms (Charlotte was especially hard hit, as was the Raleigh area). I’ve seen some storms in my life, but nothing like this…I don’t have the exact stats but it rained harder than I’ve ever seen for an hour straight (hence the title of this post) along with non-stop lightening (several trees in the immediate area got struck) and...

Yeah yeah, it’s been a little dark around here lately. I recently scored a substantial Community Server project (details to follow later on) which has been keeping me very busy…it’s a pretty large project and will keep me occupied for several months. I’m also going through a pretty bad personal slump due to some poor decisions I’ve made (details may or may not follow, still seeing how things are going to pan out in the long run), plus my Mother’s health continues to deteriorate which is always a...

One thing that really bugs me about blogs is that it’s still really damn hard to find specific information on a blog once you find it. Sure, we have things like post categories, and more recently blogs have appeared that support searching said blog for information…but the only true way to glean information from a blog is to read it from beginning to end, and who has time to do that? I’ve been blogging for 2 years now, and I’m almost at 500 posts…I certainly don’t...